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Compare the significance of houses in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Yellow Wallpaper."
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Both of these stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Yellow Wallpaper," use the setting to portray the psychology of the main characters. In "The Fall of the House of Usher", Roderick Usher is a very haunted man who lives in a house that has been in his family for generations. As he goes insane, his house starts to fall apart. He eventually dies along with his sister, Madeline. The setting symbolizes and foreshadows their deaths. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator suffers from depression due to being forced to rest and not be active physically or socially.
In both these Gothic tales, the settings are of vital importance and are inextricably interlinked with the protagonists. This is indicated by each author through the decision to include the setting in the title of the story. In Poe's story, in particular, "The Fall of the House of Usher" has a double meaning which underlines the connection between character and setting: the "house" of Usher might mean either the physical house, depicted as crumbling and melancholy, or the collapse of the family of Usher, the family line. The house in which Roderick Usher lives is an external representation of the Ushers themselves: even as Roderick and Madeline become increasingly sick and deranged, the house itself is cracking and deteriorating. Roderick himself expresses the idea that his own fate and that of the house are intertwined; at the end of the story, when Roderick and Madeline die, the house literally cracks...
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in two and sinks into the earth, symbolizing the downfall of the family as a whole.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator's fate is bound to the house she inhabits in a different way. The house is not part of her, nor symbiotic with her, but represents a prison within which she has been entrapped by the men in her lives. However, just as Roderick Usher believes he can see himself in the house, the female narrator in Gilman's story believes she can see a woman crawling around and around within the yellow wallpaper—she just does not realize that this woman is, probably, a manifestation of herself, her own psyche trapped and hysterical, unable to escape. Like Usher, she is trapped within a home, but unlike Usher, it is not her own home; she does not feel tethered to it by her own will but by the will of other people. What drives her madness is the fact of having been forcibly confined, whereas the failing health of the Usher's seems to be an inevitable sickness shared with the house itself as it decays.
This is an excellent question, as both of these short stories are wonderful examples of how setting is used to build up the Gothic atmosphere and content that dominates these tales. In particular, what I would suggest you focus on is the way in which both the house and the wallpaper act as symbolic representations of the characters who feature in these texts.
As the anonymous narrator nears the somewhat foreboding House of Usher, he describes what he sees and his general feeling of unease in ways that we come to recognise as being a perfect description of the character of Roderick:
In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability.
The house is defined by its "excessive antiquity," however at the same time it appears on the surface to be structurally sound, just as Roderick appears to be healthy and functioning as a normal human. However, just as the house has been rotting away for many centuries, we discover that the character of Roderick too is slowly disintegrating and unravelling.
In the same way, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a character who finds a strange parallel in the yellow wallpaper in her room and her own situation. The oppression and intellectual stifling that she herself is undergoing is something that is perfectly captured through the yellow wallpaper and the women or women that she sees trapped behind its bars:
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
Setting is key to revealing character, and in particular the various pressures that face both Roderick and the narrator.